Courseware for Parallel Computing using Mosaic and the World Wide Web



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Introduction

Courseware for Parallel Computing using Mosaic and the World Wide Web

S. Hurley, A.D. Marshall, S.N. McIntosh-Smith and N.M. Stephens
Department of Computing Mathematics,
University of Wales College of Cardiff,
PO Box 916, Cardiff. CF2 4YN, U.K.
Email: steve@cm.cf.ac.uk

Abstract:

The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme involves the universities of Kent, Cardiff, Southampton, and Queen Mary and Westfield College in a project which addresses the problem of the lack of teaching material to cover courses in high performance computing. These courses form part of undergraduate degree programs in computer science, physics, all branches of engineering, mathematics and electronics.

The teaching material produced by the programme will consist of ten modules of courseware, each corresponding roughly to four hours of teaching material. Delivery of the courseware will be in hypertext format and will link in to examples and code which can be run on networks of PC's, Macs and from X terminals and on the local parallel processing facilities (an nCUBE2 at Cardiff, transputer networks at Kent and Southhampton and an AMT DAP at QMW). The modules will cover material on (i) occam and transputers (Kent), (ii) scientific applications and system support for scientific computation (Southampton), (iii) computer architecture and Fortran 90 (QMW) and (iv) algorithms and paradigms (Cardiff).

At Cardiff work has been completed on linking simple nCUBE2 C programs into the Xmosaic hypertext environment on SUN workstations. This simple introductory module, which uses the nCUBE2, has the objectives of 1) familiarizing undergraduates with the Xmosaic environment and 2) instructing them in the communications routines used on the nCUBE2 computer. In the future it is planned to have modules on sorting, single-node and multi-node communication structures, linear system solvers, fast fourier transforms, random number generators and load balancing techniques.



Steve.Hurley@cm.cf.ac.uk
Thu Sep 15 15:54:59 BST 1994